John McAfee Wants to Get Back Into Silicon Valley, Without the Traffic

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Photo: Paula Bustamante/AFP/Getty Images/Getty

John McAfee made his fortune in computer security once, and he reckons he can do it again, but with as little exposure to Silicon Valley freeway traffic as possible. The not-quite-reclusive founder of McAfee antivirus software, who returned to the United States almost a year ago after becoming a "person of interest" in the killing of his ex-pat neighbor in Belize, told the San Jose Mercury News he was ready to get back into the game, but only if he could stay in Portland, where he's been living. "I'm not going to be living down here. It has changed a lot since last I worked here (26 years ago). It has grown. The traffic is nightmarish. It's just too busy for me."

McAfee has been flogging a new product that he described previously as a sort of localized network. He told the Mercury News it was "a new type of Internet, a decentralized, floating and moving Internet that is impossible to hack, impossible to penetrate and vastly superior in terms of its facility and neutrality." But he declined to provide more details, promising to announce them on Saturday at the C2SV music festival and tech conference — provided he can stand to drive there.